Human Kindness
by MJ4
Summary: *Spoiler warning, episode 2.11*. How does one tell a child, no matter how old, that his mother has forsaken him?


**Torchwood and all its affiliated trademarks are the property of the BBC and BBC Enterprises. No profit, or any other gratuity, has been made or received by the author of this story.**

**WARNING: SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 2.11 (ADRIFT). Do not read if you do not want to know what happened in that episode.**

**oOo**

How do you tell a child that he will never, or at least is unlikely, to ever see his mother again?

Whether the child is seven or seventeen, five or sixty-five, it is the hardest thing to tell someone, anyone. But what about a child who believed he would never see his mother again, a child who believed that after years of searching his mother must be dead. A child, who after decades of anguish actually saw, talked to, and touched his mother, and who now will have that last vestige of his humanity torn away from him, how do I tell him that she will not come back?

That's the position I'm in now. I stare at the door which contains the broken creature within. After everything he's seen, everything he's lived through, how can I tell him?

Oh Jack seemed to brush it off almost as a second thought, told me to not tell him, told me that if he must find out that his carers should do it. They were the people with him at all times. They were the closest thing to family he has now, but I couldn't do that, not to him, not now.

It was my fault. I destroyed his hope, her hope, I ruined everything. I was warned to "let it go" but I couldn't.

She said the worst part was "not knowing", and I believed her. I did everything I could; put my job, my marriage, my soul, on the line to help her. I risked everything. Destroyed a friendship that might never be repaired, risked the vestige of a normal life with my husband in order to help her, and when I found the thing she was looking for, praying for, she seemed, so very briefly, ecstatic. For that briefest of moments it was all worth it.

He looked at her, stared longingly at her, the tears welling up in his eyes as he saw her for the first time in so long. The look of pain and anguish on his face as she declared he was not her son, her stabbing finger like a knife through his heart, but his insistence, his longing for her so great that even through that pain he repeated all the things they had done, had intended to do, together. In those few words he showed her he loved her more than anything in this world, that, like all children, he craved his mother's love.

And she, for that briefest of moments, turned to him and, after denying him, denying herself, to accept the truth, turned to him and embraced him. Seven months to her, decades for him, all released in one hug. The happiness, the joy of finding one another, destroyed moments later when his carer, Helen, entered.

"You have to leave him now" she said. It seemed so unreasonable at that moment, but how I wish we had taken her advice.

That was the beginning of the end for the "happy couple". Gone was the happiness, the joy of finding each other. Gone was the bliss of them being reunited replaced with the scream that would separate them both forever.

She will never forgive me. She blames me for destroying her hope, and for a time I believed she was right. Now, I'm not so sure.

She wanted her son; she wanted to know what had happened to him. She was desperate for answers, but now that she has been reunited and found that what she has isn't her perfect idea of a reunion that she had in her mind she has decided that she cannot be happy.

"Before I had the memories, I could close my eyes and see him with his friends, or scoffing his breakfast. Now, all I hear is that scream."

With that one meeting she has given up on her son. Andy told me she's taken his room apart, the room she used to imagine he still inhabited, the room that brought her even the smallest inkling of comfort; she's torn it apart all because things haven't turned out as she wanted.

Andy says I've become hard, and perhaps I have. I thought that helping her would help me, save me from becoming the person who doesn't care about others feelings, to be the person I once was, but I'm not that person anymore.

Have I become hard? I believe, now, that I have, and she's made me even more so.

I brought them together, brought one happiness, brought the other sadness. He wanted, needed a mother one last time. After much wrangling I got permission for her to visit whenever she wanted, so long as her son was in a "good phase", but I don't believe she'll ever come back, nor do the carers in the institute. Now I have to break the heart of her only son, tell him that his mother has forsaken him because he isn't exactly what she wanted.

I wonder how many other people would respond as she did, how many others only have the hope keeping them going, but that having that hope is better than knowing the truth.

I wonder how many others would accept their children, their parents, their siblings back into their lives, if even for only for a few hours a day.

I wonder how many people would give up everything for the chance she had, the chance to reunite with a loved one, no matter how different they may be on the outside. No matter how damaged they may be on the inside. How many people would give everything for that one last meeting with a loved one?

Perhaps I'm not as hard as I like to believe. As much as I want to sympathise with her, I find I can't. Oh I was sad, shocked would be more accurate, at her response to me telling her that she could see her son.

"Promise me this. Promise me you'll never do this to anyone else."

I've made the promise, and I intend to keep it, but is it right? Is it right that all these people, these seventeen people and growing, are here and we can't tell the ones who love them, the ones _they_ love?

I can't sympathise with her. I want to, I do, but I can't. She's so consumed with her own thoughts that she's doing the one thing that no mother should, she's ignoring her child. Though he may be more than five decades old now, older than her even, when he sees her he is fifteen again, and happy.

Those boxes filled with _his_ things, that room she's torn apart, she could give back to him. She could give him back his memories of a happier time, before the terrible events that have shaped his life and forced him into his confinement. She could give him something to hold on to, to give _him_ hope, but she won't, too consumed as she is with her own selfishness.

I stand before his door, before Jonah's door, and I feel as little as I can, show as little emotion as I can. I feel for him, want him to have even the barest happiness, the smallest hope, but have to tell him that he will probably never see his mother again.

And so I'm left with a dilemma. Do I tell _him_ the truth, his mother is to consumed with herself to place her own son above her needs, or do I lie to protect him, or would that make things worse?

As I open the door to his room I find I have one emotion consuming me, and it sadly isn't a feeling of human kindness toward his mother and I just hope that whatever I tell him doesn't make his condition any worse; he's suffered, and is continuing to suffer, too much already.

"Jonah?"

**oOo**


End file.
